


A Moderate Self-Awareness

by JPlash



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), SPECTRE (2015), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Fix-It, M/M, Post-SPECTRE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-18
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-02 05:46:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5236556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JPlash/pseuds/JPlash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Q is surprised. Q has not known him very long, and this is maybe James’ favourite thing about him: he persists in being surprised.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I started this last week because there didn't seem to be nearly enough fix-its posted, and now there are obligingly 18 thousand. That said, the more fix-its we write, the more fixed it is, right? :P

James wishes, later, that he had shot Franz. C, it turns out, is already dead, which makes testimony of his guilt more a matter of convenience for Mallory than protecting Britain from their former (briefly, thank anything and nothing) director.

Still, confirmation from the horse's mouth makes it easier for Q to dismantle the whole thing, and Mallory _is_ M now: keeping him out of trouble for killing his superiors is possibly part of Bond’s job. It’s a moot point, regardless. Franz testifies, informally and maniacally, and he lives, and James is not so entirely out of respect for the order of things at MI-6 that he’s going to break in and do anything about it now. M’s last mission has been completed, and he has no more cause to flout her replacement.

He does not tell this—any of this—to Madeleine. She has taken his non-shooting of his erstwhile step-brother as a grand gesture of retirement, and he is uneasily reluctant to correct her. It was certainly not intended as such; nor was his choice of bridge exit. A very long day, he firmly believes, should end in the arms of a beautiful and brilliant woman, not those of medical and paperwork courtesy of Master, Quartermaster and the wheels of bureaucracy. Nonetheless, Madeleine—and possibly MI-6, if his Quartermaster’s reception and the lack of forwarded paperwork is a sign—appear to have read it all as a more symbolic sort of walking away. And perhaps, he has to consider, their willingness to let him go should tell him something. M’s last mission has been completed, and perhaps it’s time for him to move on.

*

He remembers—or admits to himself that he remembers—leaving his beach in Fethiye ten days into France by road. They don’t stop in Calais, don’t stop until they’re well west of the major routes and into the quieter coast of Rouen. They hover on the cliffs and the beaches as far as Mont Saint-Michel, where both have fond memories, then turn south by mutual but mostly unspoken agreement. She is not bothered by his always-seeing, or his security checks, or his ever-split attention. She is not as trained as he is, or as paranoid, but she is used to it. Franz was not wrong; she understands him better than perhaps any woman has but M, who was less a woman than a way of life.

They pause in the afternoons in places that are beautiful, and leave them in the late mornings; they are heading nowhere, and do not need to travel fast. They settle into the south and have excellent sex in the warm yellow sunlight, on rooftops and in fields when Bond is convincing, but mostly in beds. She is brilliant, engagingly so, far more so than he is. She is spectacularly beautiful, and hard-edged, sharp-edged, quietly unyielding. He thinks he probably loves her as much as he has anyone (as much as Tracy), since before he was himself (M was there before 007, and so was Vesper, almost, really, and he loved both with foolishness and absolution). They are in Sainte-Maxime when Bond remembers leaving the Turkish Riviera, and knows for the first time that he has lied to her, despite all his best intentions, and his careful lack of promises. 

She thinks he has retired, and he knows, remembering Fethiye, that he has not. He was furious in Turkey, and presumed dead, and he lasted almost six months. His longest sojourn before that lasted six days with a very lovely woman on a really excellent yacht after a truly hellish mission. He has well passed six days, and he thinks that speaks to the honesty of his silence—he did imagine, truly, that he might stay for her. But he is neither angry nor presumed dead, and he wonders which will call him home first: some overt disaster on the news, as it did in Fethiye, or just the itch in his blood. He lied to M too, he remembers, only now. She thought he had gone for good as well. Of course, she knew that would only happen with a bullet, not a choice.

*

She is pleased when he suggests Barcelona—the Riviera is only so much diversion—and less pleased when his route markers over the mountains veer from vistas to scars of a series of old encounters with the ETA. It is not altogether intentional—he isn’t looking for trouble. Is just seemed obvious, when plotting a course across the border, to flirt with the tangles of separatist hideouts rather than take a more direct route or follow the tourist trap of the train. They have a dozen languages between them, but neither of them speak much Basque. When they reach Barcelona, the long way around, he buys her an exorbitant assortment of flowers at the market, and she laughs, and rolls her eyes, and kisses him, and never stops looking worried.

She never stops again, really. They have been thoroughly enjoying Barcelona for almost two weeks when she tells him to go home. She’s not angry, not really, though she has been, now and then. He thinks he would have lasted a good while longer, tried months yet, for her sake. Maybe six months, once more. Probably not.

He has been unofficially retired six weeks when he drives back into MI-6.

*

Q is surprised. Q has not known him very long, and this is maybe James’ favourite thing about him: he persists in being surprised.

Mallory has not, in fact, known him very long either, but is not surprised at all. He says, ‘Welcome back, 007,’ and ‘Check in with medical this afternoon,’ and ‘Agent Moneypenny handled most of your paperwork on SPECTRE, but you’ll find it flagged for you to fill in the gaps’. MI-6, it would seem, had not watched him walk away. Only Madeleine, Q and himself had been blind enough to see that.

*

He misses Madeleine, genuinely, but he’s not cruel enough to call her. That moment is gone, as it should have been weeks ago, when she had the good sense to walk away and the poor fortune to run into Franz.

Instead, he goes in search of the car. Q Branch has, in Bond’s absence, returned to at least a semblance of its former business. It no longer looks, for instance, like their teenage Quartermaster has locked himself in a basement in a fit of pique (Q is, of course, not at all teenaged, but this is another of James’ favourite things about him: he is very easy to torment).

The car is beautiful, as always; the car is beautiful even when it is in thousands of tiny pieces, though more-so when it isn’t. Q appears to have had one of his minions paint out the scuffs sustained crossing the Pyrenees, which is almost touching. She’s a beautiful vehicle, and she deserves to be taken care of.

He tells Q this when he approaches, returned from some other part of his maze and addressing James’ name as a question, “007?” Q laughs in his odd, unattractive way at the not-quite thanks, and counters, “You brought something back to me in tact, Bond. Call it positive reinforcement.”

“I did try to get her blown up by Basque separatists.”

Q blinks once. “The ETA is barely violent these days, especially so far east, and both you and the car have GPS. I know perfectly well you were miles clear of any possible trouble.”

By the time James gets his head around this—quickly, but not quickly enough—Q is jogging awkwardly toward two minions at a bench against the far wall. James suspects he should be irritated that his Quartermaster stalked him on possible-retirement, but he’s been subject to MI-6 a long time, and Q has trusted him above and beyond the call of duty, more than once.

He leaves his car in capable hands, and sets to wandering Q Branch in search of toys to appropriate while its master is otherwise occupied.

*

He is sent to Osaka in search of an off-the-grid, unnetworked computer, or, rather, of the drive inside. Q explains this to him at a level of comprehension more suitable to a sixth form dropout. James almost protests offense, but suspects that almost anyone is so far below Q’s own level of comprehension that he honestly can’t tell the difference between addressing a sixteen-year-old and a reasonably intelligent, highly trained MI-6 operative. Also, Q’s experience with double-Os has been heavily weighted toward 009 and 003, who James would generally prefer not to address at all. He can hardly be blamed for underestimating.

Q is in his ear for most of Osaka, and confirms what the days around M’s death had suggested: Q is good at this, at home-front support, as good as he is with the tech. He was the right hire, which is not really a surprise—he was M’s hire. Of course he’s right.

Osaka is both completely run of the mill—smooth but not too smooth, mission accomplished with a little collateral, none of it human, and three enemy kills—and profoundly strange. It is his first actual mission, sanctioned by a living commander and supported by MI-6, since he brought Silva back from China. He’s spent almost nine of the past ten months dead, grounded or on leave, and the remainder on assignments of a deeply personal nature—deeply personal to M, more than himself, but he is aware that the difference became negligible long ago. His last run of the mill mission ended with him presumed dead but he’s not bothered by that. It’s almost a year past, ancient history. He’s collected a plenitude of near death experiences over the years and he doesn’t dwell on them. 

He doesn’t know why it all feels strange, and it chafes at him like sand in his socks. Finally, three days in, Q murmurs, “I run missions very slightly differently to my predecessors, 007. All the agents felt it, only the rest got over it a year ago. In that time you’ve had four days’ experience with me to adjust. You’ll get used to it.”

James hadn’t noticed a difference, consciously, but he does now, the little things—when there is and is not someone in his ear; the order in which information is given; even, broadly, the way the mission is framed—and the strangeness is gone. No more sand in his socks. M would roll her eyes.

*

He doesn’t report to Q when he leaves Mallory’s office. He delivers the Osaka drive to a less-than-impressed minion in the outer offices, but keeps his gear in favour of a note inviting Q to retrieve it himself:

_Gun in working order, gear in_  
_intended number of pieces._  
_Calls for celebration_.

_My flat, 8pm._

He arrives at his flat around six, to find a note under his door:

_No points for keeping it in tact  
if you don’t give it back._

_My office, 8am._

James bins the note, pours a little scotch, and spends a moment trying to recall whether it’s the first time anyone’s refused an invitation. Even Moneypenny shows up. He decides there was a mark in Italy, years ago, poor judgement on his part: she’d hated her husband as much as he’d guessed, but was more Catholic than he’d counted on. Heavy jewels, plunging neckline, probably beautiful but not a memorable face, and he’s fairly certain he did get as far as asking, and he’s fairly certain she never came around. Little matter.

His television isn’t actually attached to any network, and his only DVD is ten seconds long and in a box with charred photographs, yellowed papers. He doesn’t have any real books. James sits in his single chair, sips his scotch, toasts the world’s ugliest china bulldog, and considers his next move.

*

Q Branch is already buzzing by 8am. It’s more or less buzzing most times of day; it’s always early evening somewhere in the world. But it’s properly busy when James makes it in, long since full to brimming again after its short quiet, hiding from the new regime; after its shorter stillness, when C had managed to fire almost everyone but Q. Probably Q was fired as well. Mortgage or not, James strongly suspects his presence has little to do with his pay check.

Q is expecting him, though James knows he doesn’t monitor his surveillance. Q only ever expects him when he’s been told to come. It’s another of his favourite things about him.

Q is wearing his funny brown suit, which is a lot less funny than the cardigans he wore when James met him. Moneypenny says it was M, needing him taken seriously at hearings. James personally suspects that it hasn’t worked. Wrapped in wool, he looked like a joke, but absurd enough in these halls to be some sort of alien intelligence. Now, almost well suited, narrow hips and colourful tie, he looks brilliant but still a lifetime too young for his station. It will be decades before his appearance speaks for him like his work does. James keeps these thoughts to himself, because it’s not his place, and because the suits are an improvement in all other respects. He likes soft well enough, but he prefers sharp. His quartermaster has the most remarkably long, long legs.

Q’s expression is mild—almost always—but there’s a little apprehension. He’s not quite sure what 007 is playing at, James thinks.

He raises an eyebrow. “Do you have something for me, Bond?”

James hands over his case—gun, compact explosive, two remaining grenades and a device for the disruption of magnetic fields all in tact—without argument. Q responds best to a little cooperation. “Thought I might lure you from your cats for an evening.”

“Why?”

“Need there be a reason?”

“Contrary to reputation, Bond, you aren’t one for entirely wanton destruction.”

James gives that an eyebrow.

Q sort of huffs, quietly. “The only person you’ve had to your flat is Ms Moneypenny.”

“Which puts you in excellent company.”

Q frowns, pauses with his fingertips on the docile grenades, then turns to face Bond, shifting half a step closer in the motion. There isn’t the edge of panic that was there in Switzerland, but a similar sense that Q is bracing himself, and the same deep, unconscious sincerity. “I may be entirely mistaken, Bond, but in case I’m not. I avoid casual sex with colleagues. I’m afraid I’m not as skilled as most agents at balancing the personal and the professional in that respect. If your intentions are—in that direction, you’re wasting your time.”

The eye contact holds for another beat, and then Q sort of nods minutely, and turns back to his work. James nods too, equanimous. “Fair enough.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

It’s an odd conversation, but James is becoming used to odd conversations with Q. He thinks it might be one of his favourite things about him. Besides, he has at least a moderate self-awareness. He knows he likes the ones who don’t come right away. He’s not even opposed to a long-ish game. His interest has been acknowledged. Q will appear in his bed out of nowhere soon enough.

*

Q does not appear in his bed out of nowhere, or at all. Q gets on with his job, continues to flirt at precisely the low level he has almost since they met, and demonstrates no awareness that any sort of game is in motion. It is possible that James has missed his window, he thinks. There was a moment, after they met, after Q broke orders for him, when the flirting would have peaked, spurred by adrenaline and its aftermath, and it all would have fallen into place. He wasn't in the mood, at the time, and now it's impossible to start over. It's always tricky, finding a way in for Act II.

Nonetheless, James wants him, which doesn’t happen often: his interest is rarely piqued, in recent decades, and when it is, he has what he wants and forgets about it. He doesn’t look for sex much outside of work. He’s more physically fit than most twenty-year-olds, but sexually he’s still an aging man. His libido, the physical side of it all, is well-satisfied in the field, and he’s seduced enough models and trophy wives to sate most curiosities. He’s fucked men for the job too, but in a fraction of the numbers. It’s not that, though; he could pick up a skinny, pretty young man in a bar somewhere, if he wanted to. It’s just Q.

It’s just a want, a trifle, and James ignores it.

He almost calls Madeleine one night, too early to sleep in the midst of a week un-deployed, lonely for someone else’s nostalgia for the same places, for light arguments about vodka, and casual brilliance and someone to see through his bravado. She made her position clear, though, and he calls Q instead.

“007?”

“Q.”

A brief pause. “You’re home.”

“Should I not be?”

“I was afraid you’d absconded into trouble again.”

“You wound me, Q.”

There is the very faint sound of typing down the line, constant. “Do you need something?”

Bond almost answers the truth, ‘company’, but it would sound pathetic in a way that it’s not. He hums lowly instead. “Are you still at work?”

“Yes.”

He clicks his tongue, just for how he knows it will rile his quartermaster. “It’s important to sleep, Q. Eat. Enjoy yourself, even. Mental health reqs, all that. I could report you to M.”

“M was here two minutes ago. Was there a reason you called?”

“Are you busy?”

“Always. 007.”

“Someone in trouble?”

“No, but if I don’t finish decoding this, someone will be, and I’ll be pulled away before I’m finished for the fourth time today.”

“Best not disturb you, then.”

James can sort of hear Q’s expression of not-really-disbelief. Not really exasperation, either, not quite.

“Goodnight, Q.”

He hangs up before Q can ask again.

*

He could never have stuck with his sort-of retirement, James realises, five weeks back, because he didn’t love his Dr Swann for her beauty and her brilliance. Not even for those and her confidence or her honesty or her independence. He loved her, he realises, for all those things, and because she was lethal, brutal, hardened, not altogether but enough. He loves women who will kill, and do it well, when it’s ugly as well as when it’s elegant. He likes the rest a great deal, but he loved the brutality, and she didn’t. She was running from that part of herself, probably wisely, but running nonetheless.

The woman he loved was never on offer.

He thinks about inviting Eve around—Eve who is beautiful, confident, independent, and terrifically violent, and very clever, and even fairly honest, for him—but it’s because he wants to make love to her, and she has a partner now.

He watches a documentary, instead; he properly installed his TV weeks ago, when Q got sick of his boredom and threatened to send a minion to do it. It’s about the far north of the world, mostly Russian forest, and he watches it with half a bottle of scotch, and goes to bed before it’s done.

*

Q is probably the most dangerous person Bond knows.

Q knows this from the start—so does M, the one who hired him and the one who followed.

James does not know this from the start, or a year later, but he begins to know, slowly.

He knows first, before a year, well before, that Q is terrifically dangerous in cyberspace. He has only inklings of what this means, but he understands its significance. Q could destroy a man, easily, in all the trappings of life but body and mind. Mind, too, perhaps; easy enough to drive a man mad, with control of the rest. And once the mind is gone, what matter the body?

He comprehends toward a year, back at work more than a month, that Q is as dangerous as M, perhaps even as dangerous as his M was, alive. He can destroy a man himself through his keyboard, yes, but he can also build the tool that will actually tear him apart, choose a man to wield it, and execute his will as surely as if the hand were his own. M orders an execution, but Q will, if called for, decide it should be slow poison, choose the poison, build a delivery system, guide the hand. He’s in the ear of his reaper, as often as not, and often looking through a camera somewhere too. There’s fortitude in that: in being ready to choose ugliness when necessary, and being ready to see it through.

He realises, suddenly and not at all, six months back from Spain, that he adores Q—not because he is the most dangerous person he knows, but the realisations do come together. He’s picking up equipment, out to Abuja in six hours, and Q is remotely borrowing a drone that doesn’t strictly belong to him, to deliver some sort of ammunition to 004, because, as he remarks, ‘I would very much like to watch you kick Mr Armand mostly to death, then piss on him before you break his neck with your hands, but it wouldn’t be terribly professional when you can kill him from outside and avoid tipping off the rest.’

Q is terrified of airplanes, hates operating in crowds and prefers to be enthroned in his basement, but he is lethal, and not in the abstract, distant, naïve way he probably was as a teenage hacker. Q understands the same violence that James does, but with a thousand times the intellect (and a lot less physical prowess). Q knows his own worth and will stand to it; he’s beautiful and sinuous and sharp and utterly brilliant and fiercely independent; fiercely everything, anything, really, beneath the mild manners. Q is helplessly honest, utterly open and sincere, for reasons and in ways James doesn’t know at all and doubts he could comprehend.

James wants him, wants to take him away and have reckless adventures full of excess, wants to kiss him in the empty alcove off the garage, wants to fall asleep and wake up with him, another day and another and another. It’s not by any means a new feeling, but it’s not one he’s had often. It’s not, he suspects, one he’s ever had without substantial delusions about the person in front of him.

Probably he’s deluded now, about Q.

Still.

*

Abuja turns into Mogadishu, of course, of all the bloody awful places, and then, thankfully, into Cairo, which (like anywhere else on Earth) is vastly preferable, and then, oddly, into Tbilisi, not for any relationship with any Russians (or Georgians) but because the mark’s brother is showing at fashion week there.

He gets home in one piece, a little bruised, not all that much blood. His gear doesn’t get home in one piece, but Q should really be used to that.

He leans against Q’s work surface like he’s not in the way, and offers, “I hear you don’t enjoy casual sex. How about dinner?”

Q blinks, almost says something—James is irritatingly uncertain what—and then changes to, “What about it?”

“Would you accompany me to dinner?”

Q frowns at him, a proper frown—he’s actually annoyed, rather than merely resigned to his intransigence. “I told you I don’t mess around with colleagues, Bond. Don’t make me tell you again.”

“Who said anything about ‘messing around’?”

There’s no less honesty than ever, but the openness is gone from Q’s expression. “You want to take me to dinner as a colleague.”

“As a friend, perhaps.”

Q doesn’t look away, for a whole three seconds of silence—he doesn’t even try to work at the same time.

“Alright. I’m busy tonight. But tomorrow, if nothing comes up.”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

“Stop smirking.”

“Wouldn’t dare.”

“007.”

“Yes, Q?”

“Get off my bench.”

James grins—it is not a smirk, and there is a difference—all the way back to ground level.

Terrified employees jump out of his way in the halls.

*

Q cancels dinner the following evening, but manages the day after that.

Q is not at all convinced they will have anything to talk about in a restaurant full of people without security clearance.

Bond is very good at conversation.

Dinner is delicious, they split dessert, and they split two bottles of wine, both of which go three-quarters to Bond. After dessert and bourbon, they say yes to tea, which James is not sure he’s ever done before.

When the tea is done and the waiter is on his way again, Q says, "You’re not paying my bill."

James sips the last of his real drink. “There’s your mortgage to think of.”

Q snorts.

“And your cats. I’d hate to leave them starving.”

Q rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling, just barely. “This isn’t a date.”

“Of course not.”

Q appropriates the car and makes James take a cab home, because apparently a martini, nine glasses of wine and two of cognac are too much to drive. James argues that an acceptable level of inebriation for driving (and shooting, flying, gambling, parasailing, breaking and entering…) on mission should leave him more than capable at home. Q points out that 007 has no ‘acceptable level of inebriation’ on the job, and instead does almost anything regardless of any state of incapacity. Bond points out that he’d never get too drunk to do his job. Q suggests that this is only because he’s mostly too alcoholic to feel the effects. Bond suggests that this means he’s perfectly capable of driving home.

Bond is right, but Q wins anyway.

*

Bond saunters into Q Branch the following morning with a very subtle spring in his step, followed immediately by an utterly convincing sobriety as he enters Q’s lab.

Q glances up and then down again. “007.”

Bond leans into Q’s space. “The cab driver was a Chinese spy. I had to dispatch him to keep him from reporting my address. I haven’t told M yet.”

Q appears unperturbed. “Do you know how much surveillance I have on your flat?”

“I know you don’t watch it yourself.”

“I have great confidence in my staff.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t tell you about the cabbie.”

“Your car’s in the garage, Bond.”

He doesn’t look up more than a moment, but he’s smiling.

*

James Bond is not, frankly, used to putting effort into seduction outside of work, let alone doing so for more than a day or two. Nor is he entirely convinced that he wants to; he feels like he wants to, but it doesn’t seem very reasonable, and he doesn’t have a great track record with feelings.

He goes to a bar, holsters his gun at his ankle, folds his jacket over his arm. He picks up a skinny, pretty thing, pale and dark haired, a grad student in something engineering, smart but not as smart as Q, almost as pretty, sort of. Better dressed. He lies about the proximity of his flat, says he can’t wait to drive to the mark’s tiny subsidised rooms across town, procures a very nice hotel room before the boy—probably almost thirty, he should really say ‘man’—can properly argue, and makes love to him elaborately and ruthlessly. Fucks him with ankles round his shoulders. Then, when the boy’s clearly distracted by the strain on his hips, rolls off, pulls at a pliant body, presses knobbly, bare vertebrae into his chest and fucks him spooned together with legs tangled and his hands on sharp hips, bare ribs.

It’s good sex, everyone involved has a great time and in the morning, he still wants Q.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like the Skyfall-Spectre chronology is a little roomy vis-a-vis how many months here, how many there, but please let me know if I've horribly mistaken the timeline anywhere!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! Work and Christmas and Yuletide have been combining to eat me X'D Here's the second half, with porn, fluff and banter as promised. Thanks guys :D

James resists the urge to steal the Q Branch rosters, because he’s not sure he’d remember to resist the urge to text dinner invitations on Q’s evenings off. He occasionally wanders into Q Branch instead of the range, or the gym, or Russian conversation practice, or the exit. He flirts more than strictly necessary but so does Q, so it doesn’t count. He doesn’t ask Q out for dinner, because Q is excellent (if aggravating, odd) company right here, and occasionally by phone, and if he doesn’t want to be excellent company at James’ flat, there’s no reason to press the issue. This isn’t an assignment.

James Bond employs four basic methods for achieving an outcome. First, in no particular order, is stealth. In reality, this often gives way to violent force (number two). Stealth is often facilitated by advantages gained using number three: sex. The last resort (number four) is honest argument, otherwise known as the very good reason. If this were a job, given these circumstances and with sex already refused, James would carefully back off the explicit flirting a while. He would be a little aggressive about the very good reasons Q needs to keep him company, be completely businesslike about the company-keeping and be fairly sure, as an incidental or perhaps as a concreting tool, that romance would follow soon enough (at which point, recommence overt sexuality).

As it is, this is not an assignment, not any sort of job, and thus lacks a vital factor: there is no very good reason that Q should spend time with him. Seduction has, as aforementioned, been rebuffed. He’s certainly not going to secure Q as a companion by force, which leaves doing so without him noticing. Possible, maybe, but protracted, precision and potentially creepy.

This leaves him mostly out of options. 

He’s just glad this isn’t a job.

*

Q invites James out for dinner. James is entirely surprised, but is one of the world’s greatest spies and absolutely does not show it.

Q says, “I don’t go out much anymore, and last time was lovely. Do you have plans tonight?”

There is a moment of awareness that one is supposed to feign a prior engagement, appear in high demand, and suggest later in the week. James Bond is very attractive, very charming, and an international man of mystery. He has no need whatsoever to prop up his self-image vis-à-vis desirability. “I do now.”

“Excellent. I don’t want anything too laborious, just somewhere nearby. Come back around six?”

“I’ll pick you up.”

“You’re already here.”

“Figure of speech.”

“Yes, yes.”

James waits for that thought to find a conclusion, but Q edges into a cluttered space at the back of the lab, between a large set of shelves and a desk set too close, then kneels down and starts rummaging under the desk. He doesn’t emerge.

007 decides he’s dismissed.

*

Dinner is Indian, upstairs at the sort of place that takes walk-ins but doesn’t do takeout, and might even be almost not lying when its sign insists (in chorus with a hundred-thousand others) that it is ‘the oldest Indian restaurant in London.’ It’s a compromise, because Q suggests anywhere within five blocks’ walk, James suggests he has a car for a reason, Q offers to dig out the horrific reindeer cardigan 004 gave him for Secret Santa if Bond means to insist on somewhere formal, and R calls up her favourite, books them a table and tells them to get a move on.

Bond drops Q back to headquarters after, because Bond may have higher clearance than some staff driver, but, as Q notes, “Three people know my address, Bond; Eve really isn’t supposed to, and my driver is a necessary risk. I see no reason to add a fourth to the list.”

He’s a rounded-vowelled, longsighted academic and at times a sentimentalist, but he’s also the head Quartermaster of MI-6. It’s a position for the pragmatic.

*

007 is shot in the thigh in Tunisia and, once back at headquarters, refuses most of the appropriate pain relief while an overqualified surgeon attempts to improve the hack job he’s made of mending it. Q brings bags of Chinese to Medical and then, when it appears Bond has absconded, back to Q Branch and then, when the minions report that he has come and gone, back to Bond’s apartment.

Bond complains mildly and with deep insincerity about Q forcing him to get to his feet and limp to the door, and seems altogether less bothered than one should be by a gunshot wound.

He punctuates the wonton soup with two oxycodone of mysterious origin, washed down with whiskey, and Q supposes that’s fair enough.

*

Medical demands 007 come in and have his stitches checked. James makes the appointment at an unreasonably late hour, well after five, and ignores filthy looks from the doctor and one of three nurses—Medical is always, somehow, fully staffed when he’s due in, as though he’s ever done anything that four of them could stop more easily than one. At quarter to nine, he takes Italian delivery on the street corner two blocks away out of over-cautious habit—anyone who knows what he looks like already knows he works for Six, so there’s very little point to the minor misdirection—and only very slightly limps down to Q Branch.

Q is busy. James follows him around the room with an open foam bowl of bolognaise, nudging it into place on every work surface he occupies until Q gives up and types—and, at one point, solders—one-handed, freeing the other for flimsy plastic cutlery. James steals his rolling chair and more or less continues to trail him round the room, interjecting with variant degrees of helpfulness: around 9:30, 002 has no idea which Eritrean border crossings are unmanned and with Q’s mouth full and database-trawling down a hand, Bond’s memory manages to beat him to an answer. The lasagne’s good, for takeout.

Around 9:40, Q finishes his pasta, swipes James’s empty box from his lap, squashes the lot into an undersized bin, and appropriates a grainy camera feed from the gate of a Myanmar prison. It’s a busy night, a controlled ruckus of activity in the branch, and the way he blots his mouth with the not-yet-binned napkin is incongruously neat.

For several minutes, both men frown in silence at the barely distinct figure of their man bribing his way in.

“Thank you for dinner,” Q remarks, or possibly remembers. Then, as he slides the Myanmar feed away for later, “Certainly one of the more insistent meals I’ve had this week.”

By the time Bond murmurs—it’s always a deliberate murmur, even when he doesn’t really mean it to be—“My pleasure,” someone has beckoned Q frantically over to another desk.

He smiles back over his shoulder, though, unequal parts pleased and entirely bemused, and James nods his good night.

*

Bond returns from Lithuania uninjured and with almost none of his gear. When he fronts up to be not at all, definitely not, in no way likeably flippant about the loss of wildly expensive, custom-built tech, Q asks, “Dinner some time this week? You’re home for a short stretch.”

They do Wednesday, mostly griping in slapdash euphemistic code about the vagaries of Turkish intelligence; they schedule Sunday, and when Q is pinned down practically as they walk out the door, Bond hangs around and orders fancy, utterly unItalian pizza (delicious). Even Q, it turns out, does not actually drink Earl Grey with food, and has a stash of expensive cold-pressed fruit juice (also delicious, and in Bond’s case compatible with vodka) in a mini-fridge in his office. 

They reschedule the actual Sunday-scheduled dinner to Thursday, and Q downs a glass and a half of wine before their meals arrive—not enough for notable tipsiness, but enough to be notable.

The waiter brings steaks; makes the appropriate motions; leaves. Apropos of nothing much at all, Q says, “Despite my standing reservations, I find myself distractingly attracted to you, and irritatingly jealous of everyone you sleep with. I would like to note that I know it’s profoundly irrational to feel jealousy about you doing your job, but there it is. It all seems rather unnecessary, and so I thought we might do something about it, except that I’m only semi-confident you’re still interested, not at all confident I’d be appropriately detached, and not sure you’d still have dinner with me.”

Bond says, “I find sex very satisfying both before and after dinner.”

Q scowls for several whole seconds, then sort of not quite crumples; the moment passes, but all the tension is still there in his body, to someone who knows how to look. What’s left of the glare is clearly self-directed, as though he is abruptly unable to pretend he does not feel somewhat foolish. “I’d say that’s not an answer, but I’m not sure I managed a question.”

“A series of statements,” Bond agrees.

“Sometimes one has to step up and simply get to the point.”

Bond nods tacit agreement; he’s smiling, properly, in his narrow-eyed way. There is a strangely comfortable moment of silence.

“I think you’re still interested.”

It’s impossible to know whether the shift of Bond’s lips is so predatory on purpose, or if that’s just his face. “Yes, Q.”

“Which leaves the question of whether ignoring the sexual tension is likely to be easier or harder, which is not a pun, Bond, after one night of debauchery.”

Bond never glances away, never falters. “Whoever said it had to be one night?”

Q rolls his eyes. “I’m serious, 007. As far as I’m aware, those six weeks with Dr Swann were on par with the longest relationship you’ve had, and she was obviously—special. I like myself very much, but I can’t imagine holding your interest more than a day or two once you reach your objective. That’s not a problem, it’s a given. Still, I have to consider our working relationship.”

"I see." Bond’s gaze still holds.

Q frowns.

Bond tips back the last of his wine, almost unruffled. “Thank you for dinner.”

And then he leaves an excessive lump of notes on the table, swings into his jacket, and leaves.

*

Q watches him go, and probably does not conceal his surprise well. Bond likes to surprise him, to shock him, Q knows, but Bond doesn’t look back.

Q counts and then swipes half of Bond’s vast overpayment, eats one more forkful of chat potatoes, and heads out himself.

The maître d' accosts him as he reaches the door. Q turns with arch impatience. “Payment is on the table.”

“Yes, sir, of course,” the man agrees apologetically, as though the thought had never crossed his mind. “Your companion forgot to leave you with car keys.” And perhaps it hadn’t. The keys to the Aston are in one of those little trays for presenting your change.

Q starts the car with a vindictive if ineffectual twist. Is Bond truly so sure he can’t take care of himself, that he doesn’t trust him even to get back to MI-6 on his own? It’s not more than a dozen blocks from here. More to the point, Bond is being very unreasonable, and Q is determined to be cross with him, and it would be a lot easier if Bond would be brutish and awful instead of pausing his show of offence to leave his car keys. The car doesn’t deserve to be properly punished, so Q parks her in the wrong space just to be petty.

Safely walled into his office, Q dives into 007’s file. He’s read it cover to cover more than once, has read all the agents’ files, but maybe he’s missed something. Clearly he hit a nerve with his purely factual statement—he just can’t imagine how. After half an hour, he is certain there is no longer-than-six-weeks relationship he’s missed—no one returned to between jobs, no one important before Bond joined the agency, and while those details are sparse for some agents, they’re disarmingly thorough for Bond. M didn’t believe in privacy for her people.

After another half hour, Q has an unlikely idea. Maybe Bond wishes he’d had something more lasting—he’s had little enough chance. His ‘first great love’, as far as that goes, betrayed him and then died about ten minutes into their glorious future. His wife was shot dead before they reached the honeymoon. He’s required to have an awful lot of sex for the job, which has to make relationships tricky—though he’s required to keep the job almost entirely secret, which is probably trickier. And he didn’t stick to the stunning Dr Swann, true, but she only wanted him retired, and, well. Not wanting to retire isn’t the same as not wanting a relationship.

Q turns it this way and that in his mind. It seems an absurd proposition, the sort of thing a pathetic admirer would dream up to make feasible their fantasy romance. But Q doesn’t really do that sort of thing and the more he looks at it, the more plausible it seems. Yes, Bond has a reputation for playing and not staying, but that’s hardly valid if he’s never actually had a workable choice. And if Q chooses to count it, Bond has been taking him out for dinner, when he’s home, for—more than two months. Well over six weeks. Which is hardly all that long, and also hardly a relationship, but maybe….

So maybe that’s it—the nerve. Maybe it was, despite intent, a cruel thing to say. It’s possible, Q supposes. And if he really thinks about it, it was perhaps tactless to refer to sex in Bond’s personal life as an ‘objective’, given that 007 secures MI-6 objectives through sex on an almost weekly basis. He’s usually rather good, at seeing the 00 agents as people, rather than just—well, agents—and he’s not quite sure how he forgot that when Bond’s the one he eats with and talks to and actually sees outside of work.

If Q were one of 007’s marks on the job, he has to admit, Bond would have found a way through his reservations in a day. Probably an hour. That he hasn’t—that he’s respected Q’s statement of non-intent—could, in theory, have nothing to do with limited interest (Q’s entirely, absolutely reasonable assumption, really), and everything to do with, well, that. With the fact that—007 isn’t on the job. He isn’t working to an objective. And perhaps it’s not fair, Q thinks, to make assumptions about James’s actions based on his knowledge of 007.

It’s possible, he concludes, that he’s well and truly cocked this up.

*

James opens the door, but not very far.

Q says, “Hello.”

James says, “I would have retrieved the car at headquarters.”

Q swallows, tries not to look like he’s bracing himself, almost certainly fails, and says, “I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to say.”

James raises both eyebrows, the picture of incomprehension.

Q only slightly glares. “You know what I mean.”

He shrugs. “Nothing to be sorry for, quartermaster.”

Q only partway rolls his eyes. “It hadn’t occurred to me that—you have a very vivid reputation, and it hadn’t occurred to me that it might not be altogether accurate. That it might be based on your work, rather than on you.”

The answering smile is no more bitter than any of Bond’s smiles. “I wouldn’t worry. I’m not a complicated animal.”

“Have we been dating for almost ten weeks?”

“I doubt it. It doesn’t take me that long to secure an objective.”

“You’ve tried to have relationships, but the only person willing to live with your career was shot the day you married her.”

“Ancient history.” A flawless, well-rehearsed shrug.

“But I work for Six, and I know your job, and I miss you when you’re away and I didn’t want to have sex because I was afraid we wouldn’t have dinner anymore.”

Bond might as well not have the door open at all.

Q tries, absently, and fails, mostly, to un-tense some of the muscles in his jaw, his brow. “I actually, god help me, like it when you loiter around Q Branch for no reason, and I like running your support even though you’re reckless and infuriating and make me very nervous, and when I first read your file, I thought it was absurd that anyone could have worked so hard to save the British people—hell, to save people in general—so many times, and not be—in the movies, on a postage stamp, I don’t know, I—I don’t know. And I like your jokes, even when they’re stupid. And you wear very nice suits.”

The door light is placed to reveal potential intruders, not light the doorway; Bond’s face might have changed, a little, the set of his mouth, but Q’s eyesight really isn’t meant for low light.

“Bond, please.” He does not bite his lips. “James.”

And James Bond steps through the doorway, lifts him one-armed almost off the ground, swings him back against the inside of the closing door in one preposterous, terrifying motion, and holds him there with nothing, body pressed to body, one lethal hand flat to the wood each side of his head, breath hot.

He says, “Are you lying to me, Q?”

Q says, “I’m an awful liar,” and also, “No.”

And James kisses him.

*

James Bond kissing is implacable and restrained by turns, or perhaps all at once; utterly in control and violently hungry; Q gets the sense that all Bond’s ice and tailored motion is built around something that would crawl in under Q’s skin and take him apart to love each muscle and each bone, and never realise ‘til too late that that a lover had become a spread of gore.

Pressed against a door, with his bottom lip slipping from between Bond’s and a thumb pressing under his jaw, this idea feels alarmingly erotic.

Bond’s hand slides up, careless and designed, thumb teasing the corner of lips then dragging back, knowing, so that Q’s jaw drops a little without permission and his lips part more, probably not attractive, and Bond presses in and licks a thin stripe over Q’s hard palette, just once, claiming, showing off, possessive, then sucks his lower lip in again and bites, almost hard, and this is when Q realises that his shirt is open because Bond has two hands and one of them is pressing his right nipple up hard with a thumb, blunt and aching and impossible to think through and then he’s flicking the other one, tracing it in circles, pinching it tight and Q is almost embarrassed but instead he’s just moaning, quiet, keening pants, hands flitting and touching and falling because he’s wonderful with fine detail, long, skilful fingers to manage the minute, but Bond like this is an endless stretch, is smooth and hot and unmarked with his scars covered by cotton, and there are probably a dozen good places to start but Q is mostly stuck on oh holy god this is happening and Bond is so good at this, fuck.

*

Bond does lift him off the ground, no effort and no warning, huge sure hands on his arse which fuck yes then squeezing—which, as it turns out, is actually a by-product of lifting—and Q doesn’t so much help as fall forward, squeak, and wrap his legs around mostly by instinct.

“You can’t just pick someone up—“

“Mm, but I can.” Bond shifts Q’s weight to one arm, probably solely because he can.

“I can—“ or alternatively, so that he can catch Q’s face in one hand and kiss him terrifically slowly, tongue pressing the line of his lips, one corner to the other, though Q’s already parting them, body falling open all over and cock aching, and the sentence doesn’t really need to finish. Bond already knows he’s perfectly capable of walking on his own, but that wouldn’t have the sweat on his ribs now on Bond’s shiny, crisp shirt and isn’t that satisfying, just a little, but mostly there’s the way Bond just controls a kiss, no question, and the way his tie feels against Q’s breastbone, and then he’s dropping, gasping (and if there’s another squeak, it’s justified), and he’s on his back on Bond’s bed and Bond surges over him like the next peak of his waveform, always already following him down, hips together in this sweet hard pressing drag, Bond twice his size and all around him in the dark. There’s only a sheet on the bed, man probably hasn’t bought a quilt, bare walls and unclaimed space, and it’s smooth and cool on his back and heavy and radiating heat everywhere else and there’s London traffic outside the window and there should be, there should be, because this is home, for both of them—this, London traffic and the rain, this is where Bond comes back to when he can’t stay away. This, wet traffic and the geography of some archaic, transmuted nationalism, this is where Q can believe that there is some tiny particle of meaning in the chaos, a moment to plant his feet in the entropy of time and space.

*

James escorts Q into the bedroom and tosses him onto the bed mostly because he’s far too old to kneel when he doesn’t have to, and it’s much easier to get between Q’s legs when they’re spread over the end of his bed.

Q is shirtless and slightly sweaty and pale in the little light from the lounge and he’s ribs, sharp and even from the exacting line of his collarbone laddering down to the wings of his hips, tipping above his trousers. James kisses those ribs as he slips Q’s fly, traces closed lips over one, bites one-two-three-four shallow marks along another, mouths at his belly then slides trousers and boxers over hips and up over a hard, damp, red cock and black hair, not so much but dark; over lean, shaking thighs and skinny calves, and over shoes, which follow, still laced, then socks, and then he pushes Q bodily up the bed with hands wrapped around his ribs, another deeply satisfying gasp, unedited and needing, and when he’s far enough up that James can grasp each knee, spread them wide and lay between them along the end of the mattress, he does so, feels powerful and airborne and endless at the moan of a whimper it elicits, then, with as little preamble as possible, presses mouth and lips and tongue down wetly over the base of Q’s cock where it swells out of hair and bone, mouths up, messy, to the tip up near his navel, then slips a finger under, swift and practiced, and slides the whole hot thing between his lips, along his tongue, and hums something like the first sip of a really smooth single malt, because the sound that gets from Q is so much better than drinking.

*

Q comes in James’ mouth, a full thick swallow plus some, because James finishes what he starts, and because there’s something wholly fulfilling about the way Q lets James spread his legs wider and wider and too wide with a palm pressed to the inside of each thigh, wide enough that his hips catch and he just pushes into it like he’s offering every joint, and because if Q only halfway manages to conceal anything from day to day, he doesn’t try to conceal a thing when there’s a mouth and a tongue on his cock and blunt nails echoing the stripes of his ribs or strong fingers wrapped around his ankles, bending his legs up so his balls ride high, high enough that James can suck a bite into the soft swell of arse just past his thigh, barely a crease because god Q is skinny and bony and fragile, can bite hard while Q just lets him, frantically wrapping his own hand around his cock, then confiscate Q’s wrist and go back with his tongue, with his lips, with the slightest scrape of teeth, press the hard tip of his tongue into the pocket of the foreskin and suck and then sink down, down all the way as Q jerks and jerks and comes with a string of profanities and “Bond, James, James, fuck.”

*

Q is utterly boneless, a limp tumble of twigs, for as long as it takes James to crawl up the bed, collapse alongside him on his back. Then Q is still mostly boneless but he rolls, bleary and smiling and gorgeous, and swings a leg over Bond’s hips, only a little clumsy, and doesn’t quite slur, “Let me take care of this,” and then works James off with long, long, dextrous fingers, clever and precise and scheming, the sort of hand job that he probably read about in some sort of guide and then refined via careful experimentation and a good deal of inventor’s intuition, because it’s really fucking good and they’re done in under ten minutes, with only about twenty seconds' intervention from that smart mouth, long licks, cat-like, and probably wise because neither Q nor James is confident that Q is with-it enough to give a blow job and remember to keep his teeth open.

*

They sleep, sprawled and dreamless, until Q’s phone plays some sort of strange recording of—a hawk? Some screeching bird of prey—around four-thirty, the stillness of the wolf hours not quite receded, the deep dark of the pre-dawn still soaking through the curtains. James is on leave; Q hushes him back into repose. He listens, inattentive and dozy, to Q showering in the ensuite; watches him gather up his pants and trousers and half-dress by the light through the crack of the bathroom door; watches the pale, sloping line of his back disappear into the lounge in search of his shirt.

He returns before he leaves, crosses fully dressed to the bedside and squints until James murmurs, “Your shirt’s creased. Better call in sick.”

The first huff is surprise as much as mirth. Then Q laughs, short and honest, and shakes his head. “Some of us have to save the world every day, 007, not just every other Monday.”

James makes a noncommittal noise that is mostly about stretching. He could decide to be awake, sure, but it’s nice to choose not to.

Q makes a stutter of a turn toward the door, then halts. Plants his feet. Asks, “Dinner, if I manage a workday under twenty hours?”

Bond ‘mmmm’s lowly. “I’ll bring takeout if you’re needed late.”

Q startles at the fingers to his wrist; his eyesight really isn’t meant for low light, and possibly also not for unreasonably agile super-spies. Bond presses dry lips to his palm; to his wrist. Q breathes in, bends mostly from the waist, plants an awkward hand on the mattress, and awkwardly collides, at low speed, with some part of Bond’s jaw.

Bond, of course, manages to find his actual mouth, one touch then another then a warm moment of just-parted lips.

Q straightens grinning, just a little.

James says, “There’s something very attractive about knowing you’re off to do spectacular amounts of damage before your first cup of tea.”

If Q blushes, well, it’s almost completely dark. “That’s—mostly just a line, of sorts. I don’t really do anything much before my first cup.”

“You could do—” 

“Bond.”

“A lot of things, really, in bed before your first cup of—“

“007.”

“In fact, one of these mornings, I’m going to insist you do—“

“I’m going to work.” Q makes what might be a hasty retreat, were the lights on.

“You don’t want to do me before tea?”

“Saying it without inflection does not make it clever, Bond.” His hand’s on the front doorknob when he calls back, “Don’t come irritate me until dinner. You’re distracting.”

Bond waits until he hears the door open to call back, quiet and easy in the dim, “Very good.” It’s entirely facetious, but Q was expecting that—if he weren’t smart enough for that, James suspects he wouldn’t be nearly so crazy about him.

In the silence after footsteps recede down the hall, James rolls his shoulders and breathes out what he privately thinks of as something between an affirmation and a purr. He has at least a moderate self-awareness. This isn’t a new feeling, but it’s not one he’s had often, and it’s not one he’s ever had with the stirrings of London traffic out the window, the promise of heading in to shoot paper cutouts when the sun comes up, argue about Italian slang with 004, if she’s made it back on time, share dinner with the irregular orbit of the techs and the magnetic field of Six all around, binding and fatalistic and safe.

This isn’t a new feeling, but it’s never quite the same twice.

This time, perhaps (if they both keep on surviving)-, this time, he thinks, just maybe, he might be enough—they might be enough—to make it stay.

(The bamboo and ginger and lotus root that evening (in Q’s office—not time enough to leave, but enough to pause) is delicious. Q’s smile is better.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's be honest, I write fic, that definitively means I want you to leave comments :P <3


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